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Here Today, Guano Tomorrow
The Dayglo Abortions squelch their Punk Fury back to the Kootenays
by Ferdy Belland
“Our recent shows through the B.C. Interior have been really great,” said Murray Acton, guitarist-vocalist for Victoria’s hardcore punk legends Dayglo Abortions (colloquially known worldwide as the Dayglos).
“We’ve been focusing on playing smaller towns – and things get unexpectedly crazy. For example: we just packed the place in Sechelt – I mean, Sechelt! There were maybe 10 visibly identifiable punkers in the crowd; mohawks, spiked hair, dog collars, big boots, chains, you know…but everybody else who was crammed into the bar was this crazy cross-section of wild-hearted townies who all wanted to have a good time!”
The wild-hearted townies of the East Kootenay now have their good time planned for them as the legendary Dayglo Abortions take the stage this Saturday, November 5 at the Cranbrook Hotel Pub (719 Baker Street), with opening support from special guests Neveranother (Vancouver), Dirty Audio Machine (Vancouver), and Toaster (Nelson).
“Up until spring 2023 we’re going to play two weeks on, two weeks off, and just attack the smaller towns we either always missed before, or towns we haven’t been to in 20-plus years…and Cranbrook’s on our list!”
Like most of their old-school punk colleagues, the Dayglos reputation as an unstoppable touring engine shows no sign of slagging, 40-plus years into their crazy adventures.
“We’re going to hit every fucking shitty little cowtown in the entire country,” boasts Acton. “Ticket sales? Who cares? We’ll play to an empty bar. Nothing we haven’t done before. We don’t give a shit. People are dying for entertainment. And the live scene is popping back to life! For every band that died during the height of the pandemic shutdowns, there’s a new young band coming up in their place who are even better! And these new kids are good – you can tell they’ve been studying their YouTube tutorial videos! There are some really good new musicians coming out.”
Proudly sporting one of the uppermost offensive band names in music history (shocking and edgy even for the Punk world), the Dayglo Abortions formed in Victoria in 1979 as one of Canada’s first-generation Hardcore Punk bands, sharing a thriving music community that included other notable acts like D.O.A., the Subhumans, SNFU, and the Forgotten Rebels.
Borrowing as much from the buzzsaw riffery of the nascent thrash-metal worlds as from the musical influence of the Dead Kennedys (almost making them Canada’s answer to D.R.I.), the Dayglos immediately elbow-smashed their way into the Punk consciousness through ferocious live performances – and some of the most shocking lyrical content ever committed to record.
Murray Acton (known by his punk stage name of ‘The Cretin’) has remained the band’s guiding light from the get-go, and the band has cycled through such colourful characters as ‘Jesus Bonehead,’ ‘Couch Potato,’ ‘Nev the Impaler,’ and ‘Wayne Gretsky.’ The current lineup has bassist Mike Jak, guitarist Matt Fiorito, and drummer Blind Marc holding down the rumble and thump and crunch behind Acton’s guitar slashings and verbal onslaught.
“We’ve been around so long now that we might as well be considered folk musicians,” beams Acton. “Sometimes I feel like we’re taking over from Stompin’ Tom! Whenever we hit the small towns, it almost feels like that – how the crowds respond to us: the excitement, the fascination, the curiosity, the reverence, even. ‘You guys are such Canadian Icons!’ – we get that a LOT now. I don’t know if we’re true ‘Canadian Icons’ per-se, but I do notice that over the past 10 years people have been treating us really good. We get a lot of homecooked meals, as opposed to grabbing gutburgers from a gas station.
“And it wasn’t always like that for us, right? I don’t know if it’s the ‘Icon’ thing or just the fact that we keep taking the time to return to their town to give them all a good time. It’s very kind of them to say such things, but it rolls off my back. It’s all good; it’s all entertainment! And if the crowds are entertained, gig after gig, then I’m entertained. We’re just trying to put a smile on people’s faces, you know?”
And the smiles created by the Dayglos are wide indeed, if one’s thick-shinned humour can appreciate gasp-inducing album titles like Feed Us a Fetus, Here Today Guano Tomorrow, Two Dogs Fucking, Little Man in the Big Canoe, Corporate Whores, and Holy Shiite, among others. And with songs like “Dogfarts,” “Fuck My Shit Stinks,” “Drugged and Driving,” “Fuck Satan to Death,” “Argh Fuck Kill,” “Kill the Hosers,” “Religious Bumfucks,” and “I Want to Be an East Indian,” the only way ANYONE reading this very article ever heard the Dayglos in the pre-Internet era was through your older brother’s cool punk friend who had the battered cassettes with the cracked cases – and mostly hidden from the parents.
This stuff never hit the radio. Not even college radio. It was that outrageous. It was that much over the edge. It was that thrilling. Guilty pleasures? Guilty as charged.
“We recorded our latest album, which has the timely title of Hate Speech, during the pandemic shutdown and we’re eager to get the freshly-pressed vinyl records in our grubby mitts! We’re planning on recording another EP in December, too. (Ripcordz bandleader) Paul Gott’s releasing another compilation album soon, and I want to include a song from my side-project band Upsidedownworld…and if anything is gonna get anybody cancelled, a couple of songs on that might!”
One can only imagine.
Whatever the Dayglo Abortions have to offer works for a certain percentage of the music-loving population.
“Whether or not your humour is necessarily aligned with my particular form of humour? It doesn’t matter,’ said Acton. “We were – and still are – on a mission. A mission to deliver hilarious, obnoxious, obscene humour – at lightning speed and high volume! What we watch out for with the modern cancel culture crowd is singing about certain social issues. We aren’t slagging transgendered people. We’ve never been about hurtful, harmful shit like that. We’re not about bashing common individuals who are lonely and hurting in this world – that’s what we punks were in our beginnings. We go after political figures. We go after questionable belief systems. We’ve toured lots down through Oregon, through the militant-hipster-Activist heartland, Ground Zero for the Social Justice Warriors, playing in ultra-PC centres like Portland and Eugene and such…and we don’t shiver in fear.”
It’s been many years since Acton and his crew have shivered in fear over much of anything. Protesting church groups, enraged lawyers, glowering policemen – nothing fazes Acton much. The Dayglos briefly gained international tabloid awareness over the controversy behind their 1988 album Here Today, Guano Tomorrow: a touchy OPP officer (triggered by the cover artwork on his daughter’s copy) instigated an obscenity investigation into the band, which dragged Dead Kennedys vocalist Jello Biafra into the legal fray until the case was thrown out of court in 1990. A drop in the provocation bucket in the life of the Dayglos. And then there was the scandal surrounding the lyrical inspiration of “Hide the Hamster,” but that’s another story.
Murray Acton’s tongue-in-cheek sophomoric gutter humour still leaves many unsuspecting squares stunned utterly speechless – but to those who are in on the obvious joke, the Dayglos are as much a beloved raunch comedy act as they are cutting-edge Punk-Metal crossover rockers. As SNFU’s late frontman Ken “Chi Pig” Chinn once said, admiringly: “I didn’t notice my ears were bleeding because I was laughing my head off.”
“I seem to have carved myself out a little notch where I can more or less speak my mind and people simply shrug and say ‘whatever, that’s just Murray doing his Murray thing.’ Sarcasm just flung over the edge. And I get away with it, for the most part! I can say more-or-less anything on Facebook, and I have NEVER been censored, or had my account suspended or shut down…and I have said some REALLY gnarly stuff on there, believe me!
“Just for fun sometimes I’ve tried playing with the bloody censor-bots, with no repercussions! I’ve seen so many friends get knocked off Facebook all the time, for minor shit. Maybe I have this secret license Mark Zuckerberg issued me without my knowledge where I’m allowed to be sarcastic? I am aware of what the social-media issues are, and sometimes I’ll write shit in brackets within an online conversation – things like METH LAB, CHILD PORN, KILL THE JEW PRESIDENT and shit like that, just to see what’ll happen – and calmly continue the previous conversation…just to see if the spellcheckers are awake!”
As one of Canada’s most notorious Punk ambassadors, Murray Acton wins friends and influences people wherever the Dayglos’ tour van takes him.
“We were playing this bar in Salem,” recalled Acton, “and there’s this large lesbian who owns the joint, standing behind the bar – and behind her on the wall is this huge sign that reads THIS IS MY SAFE SPACE. I looked at that and thought: ‘okay, cool.’ She was a little standoffish at first, at the beginning of the night. And there were definitely some uptight people in the bar who were trying to bait me, beaking off, some hecklers in between the songs…but the way you deal with people like that is not by confronting them right away. You’ve got to invalidate their belief system. You don’t bark into the mic, saying ‘ahh, all your stuff is a bunch of nonsense!’ You tell them that you believe in the same things, and that you support them and everything they’re doing. It’s exactly the same as what I was doing when I was a kid back in the 1970s. Fighting for people’s rights and such. Incensed with the injustices in the world. It’s the same mindset. It just has a different spin on it now. If you let everyone know that you’re on their side, they soften up right away.
“At that same gig, at the end of the night – one of the other bands on the bill had two female band members, neither one of them wearing shirts or bras, stripped naked to the waist, and they’re just daring you to stare at their tits! You need to know how to not fall into the obvious traps some of these people try to set up for you and just keep cool about it. Blind Marc’s a bit old-school, so he doesn’t really do well socially under pressure sometimes. I had to butt in on a number of heated conversations. ‘What Marc intended to say was more like…’ and so on.”
Murray Acton wraps up not with a disclaimer, but a simple explanation, and if one can’t understand, no explanations will work.
“I don’t have a problem with thin-skinned, easily offended people at all. For the most part, they’re just a bunch of sincerely concerned young people who are out to make the world a better place. I remember when I was a kid and my Dad used to say the same shit to me, and his Dad said the same shit to him when he was a kid, and so on and so on. It’s not really anything new. The kids’ music ALWAYS sucks! And nobody can understand their politics! Shit turns over. It’s the kids’ turn now. We’ve made a horrible place out of the world and it’s time it was fixed – environmentally, politically, economically, socially. Maybe they know something I don’t.”
The Dayglos perform live in concert Saturday, November 5 (doors 8 p.m., showtime 9 p.m.) at the Cranbrook Hotel Pub (719 Baker Street), with opening support from Neveranother, Dirty Audio Machine, and Toaster. Advance tickets still available: contact 250-489-4442.
Images submitted
